At the moment, you are right and the prefix is not needed. If you miss out the prefix then Electrum will default to the legacy address. However, given that Electrum is (rightly so) moving more and more towards treating segwit as the standard address type, given that they removed the option to generate legacy wallets from the GUI, then I suspect in the future when importing a private key it will change to default to segwit if no prefix is included. I included all three prefixes merely for the sake of completeness.

This is not correct when considering Electrum seed phrases, which are different from BIP39 seed phrases.

Electrum seed phrases do not contain a checksum, but do have a version number encoded in to them. The version number is the first (usually) 3 nibbles (12 bits) of the SHA512 hash of the seed phrase. For the sake of non-2FA segwit wallets (which is the default wallet which Electrum will produce), these first 12 bits must be 0x100.

Given that these are 12 bits, then there are 2¹² = 4096 possibilities for these 12 bits. So by brute forcing one word to one of 2048 possibilities, there is only a 50% chance on average of finding a word which satisfies these conditions in the entire search space.

Partly. I would bet that only two or three Reps or Senators could even give you a definition of a cryptocurrency, let alone explain what they are or how they work. But even then, they are quite happy to pass laws or regulations regarding it, not understanding the implications or ramifications of these laws. See, for example, the infrastructure bill which tries to make everyone collect the tax information of everyone else they trade bitcoin with.

You misunderstand my post. I'm saying that they should at least treat it that way, not that they already do. The tax situation here is a complete mess, with every trade between fiat and crypto or crypto and crypto generating a taxable event.

There are dozens of bots ran by various people monitoring addresses which are derived from private keys which people are likely to use if choosing a private key manually, which is obviously something you should never do. Common patterns, such as all 1s or the very first or last private keys in the space, as I described above, are generally monitored. As are any private keys derived from common brain wallets, such as a SHA256 of the phrase "bitcoin", "password", or "correcthorsebatterystaple". Send any coins to one such address, and there will be a transaction sweeping those coins out broadcast within seconds.

Not only that, but the proposal doesn't actually solve the problem of people not spending their bitcoin - it only incentivizes people to move bitcoin around between their own addresses and clog up the network with unnecessary transactions.

Agreed. In the US, at least treat it the same as any other foreign currency in which there is no tax for any purchases under $200. Unfortunately our legislators don't understand the first thing about bitcoin or cryptocurrency.

They might debit your account immediately, but the merchant does not receive the money immediately and still has to wait a few business days. And as has been said above, these transactions are still reversible for weeks or even months after they are made. The same is true for things like PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and so on.

The only fiat method which is faster and more final than bitcoin is physical cash.

Sure, there is nothing stopping it except math from stumbling across a funded private key. I suspect that if you did, a script somewhere on the site would automatically import the private key and sweep the coins before you could, though.

It could, but you are almost certainly underestimating just how super-super lucky you would need to be. We are talking in excess of winning the lottery 10 times in a row lucky.

They keys are not arranged randomly. What you are seeing is private keys in the WIF format, which is converted from the standard HEX format of private keys. The first key which shows 99+ transactions (5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEB3kEsreAnchuDf), when converted to HEX, is:


Someone has obviously picked this private key manually (which is incredibly stupid, but some people do it). You can see the same with other private keys of certain patterns. For example, the private key:


Leads to the address 1MsHWS1BnwMc3tLE8G35UXsS58fKipzB7a, which also has some transactions.

Correct.

The only reason most miners would mine a block with no other transactions is if they find a block very quickly after another one.

When a miner receives the information that another miner has mined a block, that miner has to validate that block and then cross reference every transaction within that block against their own database of unconfirmed transactions, and remove all the unconfirmed transactions which have now been confirmed. If they tried to mine a block which contained a transaction which had already been confirmed, that block would be invalid and would be rejected. That process can take a few seconds. In the meantime, instead of just stopping all their mining activity and letting their machines sit idle, they simply try to mine an empty block which cannot be rejected for containing an already confirmed transaction, since it doesn't contain any transactions. Rarely, they are successful, and mine an empty block but still claim the (currently) 6.25 BTC block reward. Usually they are not successful, and once they know which transactions are now confirmed, they build a new block filled with the unconfirmed transaction with the highest feerate, and try to mine that instead.

Every block has a base block reward of (currently) 6.25 BTC. Miners build what is called a candidate block, where they create a block they want to mine filled with whichever transactions they want, which are usually the transactions with the highest feerate. Every miner will have a slightly different candidate block. Each miner then tries to solve the necessary hash equation for their own candidate block. Whichever miner is successful first, mines their candidate block and broadcasts it to everyone else.

Goodness me, that post was 18 months ago! Doesn't time fly when you are stuck in a global pandemic locked up in the foxhole having fun?

My already rented avatar is still not for rent.

Shortening the block time will never be a solution for faster transactions.

The most common scenario to need a fast confirmation is a physical point of sale transaction - where I am in a store in person, paying for goods at a cashier. These sales need to take place within seconds. Even a minute is too long to wait for a busy cashier with a queue of people waiting to pay. To achieve this you would need to drop the block time to well under a minute, which would cause so many stale blocks (as you point out), that you would end up having to wait for more than a minute anyway to be sure the chain of blocks you are viewing isn't about to be discarded for a longer chain.

The solutions to this are for merchants to accept small value zero confirmation transactions, or to use a second layer solution such as Lightning.

Because people don't understand the fiat system, and so compare a transaction being broadcast with fiat to a transaction confirming with bitcoin.

When I swipe my credit card in a store, that is pretty much the same as broadcasting a still unconfirmed bitcoin transaction. I see the transaction on my wallet or app, the merchant can see the incoming transaction, but no money has actually moved. For some reason, people think that the credit card transaction is now complete, and the bitcoin one isn't, whereas in reality the fiat does not actually reach the merchant for 3-5 working days and can be reversed for anywhere between 90-180 days, while the bitcoin reaches the merchant and cannot be reversed after ~10 minutes. They compare broadcasting a credit card transaction to a bitcoin transaction becoming irreversible, which is obviously an unfair comparison, then lambast bitcoin for being so slow, while in reality the bitcoin transaction is orders of magnitude faster to finalize than the credit card transaction is.

I'm maybe out of the loop here since I don't really use Windows for anything serious or security related, but last I checked, Windows did not have a full disk encryption option, unlikely pretty much every Linux distro. BitLocker will do it, but it is only available on Professional or Enterprise editions, which most people do not have. So you are left either trying to set up your own system which is likely to beyond the capabilities of many users, or not encrypting the whole disk but only encrypting your wallet files. With most Linux distros, it's as easy as checking a box and entering a decryption key during the install process.

Now that's where plausible deniability comes in, but that isn't really relevant to the discussion about which OS you are using. There are things like hidden volumes which would allow you to hide the existence of both your wallet files and your wallet software.

Sure there are - any piece of software has the possibility of bugs and vulnerabilities. But if I can install a bare-bones operating system with no unnecessary software, compared to installing something like Windows 10 which has literally gigabytes of unnecessary code, then the potential for critical vulnerabilities is much smaller.

If you want to make the jump from Windows, then try out Linux Mint. It is designed to be as similar to Windows as possible to make the transition almost seamless. You can even boot it from a USB just to play around with it, or set up a dual boot so you can you always fall back on Windows if you need to.

All the selfies (which you can find examples of online if you want to go looking for them) were of users holding up pieces of paper with "Binance" written on them alongside their ID. There is no reason that any company other than Binance or their third party partners would have thousands of such pictures. And regardless, Binance admitted the data came from a third party that they sent users' KYC data to, they contacted all the users in questions to tell them about the hack, and they gave them all free lifetime VIP memberships. So yes, it was Binance's fault despite their initial statement that nothing had been "obtained from Binance".

This statement in this case about nothing being leaked from "their own servers" is exactly the same. Binance are neither honest nor trustworthy when it comes to security of data.

Because there is no computer system in the world which is 100% safe from attack or bugs or vulnerability, and every additional piece of software present is a potential attack surface. If someone gains physical access to my airgapped Linux computer which is encrypted at rest, then I'm fairly confident they would find it impossible to extract any meaningful data from it. If someone gained access to an airgapped computer with Windows 10 on it, then I have no idea what kind of bugs and vulnerabilities they could exploit. Even just looking at Cortana, there have been a number of serious vulnerabilities (such as https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/CVE-2018-8140) which would allow an attacker to extract information or plant malware.

Or perhaps vulnerabilities in Windows print spooling software: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/CVE-2021-34527
Or perhaps in Windows media player: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/CVE-2021-34439
Or perhaps in Windows DVD codecs: https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/vulnerability/CVE-2021-1668

The list is endless. Every piece of unnecessary software and bloatware is a new risk. If I'm going to the effort of physically removing hardware to create an airgapped device and installing a clean OS, then why would I not pick the OS which is more secure and has fewer vulnerabilities? It's a no brainer.

I had the same argument a while back regarding a hardware wallet which came with Tetris installed on it. Fun, maybe, but a completely unnecessary piece of code and therefore a completely unnecessary security risk.

Not necessarily. Windows has far more vulnerabilities in it than most Linux distros, and also generally comes bundled with so much vaporware/junkware/bloatware like Cortana and Bing embedded in to everything and monitoring your keyboard strokes, remote access tools, and other privacy invading trash. Doesn't Windows 10 come with Candy Crush installed on it, for God's sake? Even if my computer is airgapped, I'm not trusting that mess with the security of all my bitcoin.

For now. The way that things are moving with internet connectivity being required for a number of software packages, software being rented instead of owned, software moving entirely to the cloud, and other software as a service nonsense, I can easily foresee a future where you have to rent your copy your Windows which will not allow you to do most things without an internet connection.

Exactly. I went in to a recently burnt down building once and it was EMPTY! So much for the lame stream media saying that burning buildings kill people. I've seen loads of fires in my time and never once seen someone burn alive! Hell, I've even burnt myself by accident on more than one occasion and I got better in a few days. What a scam.

Nice strawman. It's been known for decades that endogenous retroviruses exist, and indeed, up to 7 or 8% of the entire human genome is derived from virus RNA or DNA. The argument has always been that the vaccine does not cause reverse transcription and integration, and indeed the study you are quoting only shows that integration can happen with COVID infection, not vaccination.

So if you don't want COVID integration in to your DNA, time to get vaccinated.

The limit on the number of bitcoin which will ever be in circulation makes essentially no difference to the mining of blocks. All that changes from this point of view how many new bitcoins each block will generate.

Absolutely, but they would lose out on the revenue generated by collecting transaction fees.

A block is mined on average every 10 minutes. This is a constant process, even if there are no or very few transactions waiting to be mined. Blocks can be mined with no transactions in them at all. Which transactions make it in to the next block is determined by the miner who finds that block, but most miners will prioritize the transactions paying the highest feerate.

Since it seems that neither that conspiracy nut blogger, nor Tash, not tvbcof, have actually read the paper they are all referencing and are just spewing their usual word salad, allow me. Emphasis mine.


So we need a SARS-CoV-2 infection (and not vaccination) and the cytokine storm it causes (which you don't get with the vaccine) in order to reverse transcribe nucleocapsid RNA (which isn't in the vaccine).

So, all in all, another great argument for vaccination. Great work, detectives.

Pretty much. Centralized exchanges have been rapidly discovering that while they can obviously make some nice profits from charging ridiculous trading and withdrawal fees (which I still can't understand why people seem happy to put up with), the real money is to be made with information and data. It's the same reason as why Facebook sell things like the Oculus at a loss and Google practically give away Google Home devices. They don't care about making profit with these things; they care about having them in your home, care about you using them and linking up all your accounts, and care about collecting your data.

Coinbase went as far as to create their own blockchain analysis department, which they contract out to anyone who will pay, including multi-million dollar contracts to various governments and their agencies, including the CIA, FBI, DEA, and IRS. Binance bought out CMC to gather data on all its users, and have inserted their code and software all over Brave Browser to track its users too. Your data is far more valuable to these companies than the fees you are paying them.

I don't know if there is a specific software wallet which offers this functionality built in, but I already have this set up on a couple of my wallets.

I have an airgapped computer running Linux using full disk encryption. On that airgapped computer, I have Electrum installed. To access my Electrum wallet, I need to first enter the decryption password to allow the drive to boot, and then I have to enter the Electrum wallet password (which is different) to allow Electrum to decrypt the wallet.

You could also achieve this kind of set up using a hardware wallet with a passphrase. You would first need to enter your PIN to unlock the hardware wallet, and then you need to enter your passphrase to access the hidden passphrased wallet.

Alternatively again, you could just create a 2-of-2 multisig using Electrum and have both wallets on the same computer, which would achieve the same result as requiring two different passwords to spend the coins. Once Electrum starts supporting taproot, there is no significant disadvantage in terms of transaction size or fees paid to using multisig.